Lens is a French commune, sub-prefecture of the Pas-de-Calais
department in the Hauts-de-France region. If it is only the 4th city
of the department and the 19th of the region with its 31,415
inhabitants, its agglomeration is one of the most densely populated
areas of France. The urban area of Douai-Lens is the fifteenth
urban area of the country with 539,322 inhabitants. It is also
directly under the influence of the “Lille metropolitan area”, a
metropolitan area of nearly 3.8 million inhabitants whose center,
the city of Lille, is only thirty kilometers away.
The city
is best known for having been one of the main urban centers of the
Nord-Pas-de-Calais mining basin (with the Compagnie des mines de
Lens), which still marks economically, socially, landscape and
culturally today. agglomeration, for its football team, the Racing
Club de Lens (RCL), and more recently for the Louvre Lens museum,
which opened in December 2012.
Lens includes many educational
and health facilities. Today it is a university town: there is the
science, technology and tertiary center of the University of Artois,
an engineering school, the computer and industrial engineering
institute (IG2I) and several IUTs. The Jean-Perrin faculty,
installed in the former offices of the Lens mines since the
beginning of the 1990s, is the scientific center of the University
of Artois. We study biology, biochemistry, physics, chemistry,
mathematics and computer science. The city also has a district court
and a theater.
Foundation
Tradition reports that at the beginning of the
thirteenth century, Gautier and Eustache, co-lords of Mons, founded
a hospital run by the Trinitarian brothers. The influence of this
institution encouraged Jean, lord of Mons and lord of the land of
Lens, to endow it with a fixed income: thus in 1245 he established
the convent of the Trinitarians of Lens, of which the missionary
Chrétien Le Clercq was to be the father superior a few centuries
later.
See the history of Artois and the County of Artois.
In 1415, Henri de Récourt dit de Lens, Jean de Récourt dit de
Lens and Philippe de Récourt dit de Lens, fight and are killed
during the Battle of Agincourt.
Spanish period
It was in
1526, during the rise of Spain in Europe, that the city of Lens
passed into the hands of the King of Spain and therefore became part
of the Spanish Netherlands. It was not until the siege of Lens in
1647 then the Grand Condé and the battle of Lens, August 20, 1648,
to see the beginning of the Spanish decline in the region. This
battle allowed Mazarin to sign the Treaties of Westphalia, ending
the Eighty Years' War. Artois was returned to France during the
Pyrenees peace treaty ten years later, on November 7, 1659.
Discovery of coal
Lille industrialists, MM. Casteleyn, Tilloy and
Scrive, discovered coal at a depth of 151 meters in the wood of Lens
during soundings in 1849. The decree of January 15, 1853 granted the
Compagnie de Lens a concession of 6.051 ha. Lens gradually
established itself as a major urban center.
Twentieth century
The transition to the twentieth century does not prevent certain old
traditions from surviving: on August 17, 1901, a pistol duel pits a
journalist and a reader in Lens who consider themselves offended.
On May 11, 1913, 100,000 people gathered in Lens to hear The
Coronation of the Muse, a lyrical musical work in the presence of
the composer Gustave Charpentier.
First World War
The city
of Lens, located near the front, suffered greatly from the First
World War. In October 1914, it experienced the German invasion and
then until 1918, the occupation, during which it was an important
logistics center for the German army. During this period it was
heavily shelled by shells of any caliber, many of which did not
explode, which made reconstruction dangerous. Before their escape,
the occupants drowned and destroyed all the mine shafts.
The
population of the city halved at the end of the war, in
January-March 1917, the civilians were evacuated on the orders of
the Germans. She received the Legion of Honor on August 30, 1919. In
1918, the city and a large part of the mining area were almost
completely razed. It takes long months to clear the rubble from the
unexploded ordnance and then to begin reconstruction.
At the
end of 1918, when the first inhabitants are already returning, the
landscape is lunar. Winter is coming and paper and roofing felt are
lacking, as is food for locals, prisoners and the group of Chinese
workers who are cleaning up and rebuilding the city, as the Spanish
flu emerges and wreaks havoc, taking many adults who had escaped
death at the front, as well as women and children. At the beginning
of September 1919, the Netherlands offered wooden houses to 300
families from Lens (and 200 families from Liévin).
The war
memorial was built seven years later, on the Place du Cantin, by
Augustin Lesieux, marble maker and sculptor in Paris, with the help
of the architect Barthelet and specialized workers. It was
inaugurated on May 30, 1925 in front of around 100,000 people and
the President of the Chamber of Deputies (Édouard Herriot). It pays
homage to the miners, with a bas-relief showing a mine gallery with
broken woodwork and flooded with water, as well as to the workers
who, on their return from the war, found their work tools destroyed
by bombardments.
Between two wars
The period following the
Great War will see the influence of Lens grow, as well as its
demography. This growth is symbolized by the construction of the
Grands Bureaux of the Société des mines de Lens at the end of the
1920s, a building which shows the industrial power of the city.
Michał Kwiatkowski transferred the daily Narodowiec (founded in
Herne in 1909) to Lens in 1924. A large Polish community arrived
after the Great War and the decades that followed and gathered
around the chapel of St. Elisabeth in pit no 1. The first issue came
out of the regional press on October 12 of the same year. The
newspaper written in Polish accompanies the many Polish miners who
have settled in the region and more broadly the polonia (Polish
diaspora). Scuttled in 1940, the daily will not be printed again
until the Liberation. It ceased to appear in 1989.
On August 14, 1927, symbols of the reconstruction of the city and
the march forward, Lens inaugurated its town hall and its new
station.
On February 25, 1929, the industrial and commercial
bank of the North of Lens went bankrupt. She leaves a liability of
more than a million francs. The victims are all little people.
Édouard Herriot, Chairman of the Board, inaugurated the new Lens
hospital on October 21, 1932.
Second World War
Lens also
had to suffer the material damage of the 1939-1945 war, but to a
lesser extent than during the Great War. During the night of
September 10 to 11, 1942, 528 Jews (including 123 women and 288
children) were rounded up with the complicity of the Prefecture of
Police, and were gassed at Auschwitz. This was the roundup of
September 11, 1942, the most important for the region, where it took
place everywhere but particularly struck the community of Lens,
which could not count on the support of the population28. Part of
the foreign Jewish community was of Polish origin and had arrived in
Lens in the 1920s, along with other Poles having engaged in the
mines. This had not taken place without a certain dose of xenophobia
and anti-Semitism, especially at the end of the interwar period,
with the creation in July 1938 of a "Provisional Committee for the
Defense of Trade. French ”which denounced, by posting, the arrival
of a“ NEW FLOW OF 300,000 JEWISH EMIGRANTS […] divided between
France, England and the United States ”.
A street in Lens,
rue des 528-Déportés-juifs, created in the 2000s, commemorates the
event. A plaque was also placed in 2002 on platform number 1 of the
station where the boarding of the train to Auschwitz took place.
In early December 1943, the first meeting of the Pas-de-Calais
departmental liberation committee took place in Lens.
The
city was bombed by the allies on April 22, 1944, causing the death
of 250 people.
Postwar period and the post-war boom
The
post-war period saw the nationalization of the old coal companies
with the order of December 14, 1944 of the Provisional Government of
the French Republic (GPRF) headed by General de Gaulle. With the
Thirty Glorious Years, the city grew further to reach 42,733
inhabitants in 1962, then welcomed many immigrants from North
Africa. It took on sufficient importance to split the Arras district
in two, and in 1962 to create that of Lens, which included its
mining conurbation of Lens with, among others, the towns of Liévin,
Carvin and Hénin-Beaumont. It is its coal basin that has enabled
Lens to become an industrial city oriented towards carbon chemistry
(Mazingarbe, Drocourt, Vendin-le-Vieil) and metallurgy (boiler
making, wire drawing).
Two buildings were then protected from
historical monuments: the station (shaped like a locomotive)
registered in 1984 and the Maison Syndicale des Mineurs partially
registered in 1996.
Crisis and reconversion
The decline in
coal mining from the 1960s onwards, then the total cessation of
mining in 1990, led to a serious conversion crisis. Lens saw its
population shrink for thirty years, its shops and cinemas closed and
unemployment soared. Since then, the city has diversified its
industrial activities around the textile industry, metallurgy,
automobile construction and the food industry, as well as around
medical functions (important hospital center), tertiary (banks,
health centers). 'calls) and administrative (sub-prefecture,
University of Artois).
The city was nevertheless ranked the
ninth poorest city in France in 2010 by the Journal du Net because
of the high unemployment (15.21% * of the working population) and
the low income of its inhabitants (10 074.3 euros per year on
average). Indeed, more than half of tax households declare less than
11,250 euros of income per year (reference tax income).